Hanami, or How to Pretend Anime has Easter Specials

Easter (Pascha in non Germanic nations) and Christmas are traditionally the two most important Holy Days of the Christian Ecclesiastical Calendar.  And so in the many cultures where Christianity has been the dominant Religion for centuries they are also two of the most important Secular Holidays.

Japan is not a culture where Christianity has ever been the dominant religion.  But it has spent the last Century and a Half of it's history being to varying degrees influenced by those cultures.  And so during that time Secular Christmas has caught on and became a popular Holiday in modern Japan, allowing Anime to seemingly have just as many Christmas specials as Western Cartoons have.

Easter did not catch on in the same way however.  Maybe Easter is just harder to separate from what's inherently Christian about it regardless of how much Puritans complain about all the Bunnies and Eggs.  And so this makes it difficult for a Christian Anime website like Beneath The Tangles to have the same fun during Lent that they have during Advent.

Another thing Easter has in common with Christmas is being compared to observances Pagans engage in at about the same time of year.  Often with hostile intent, claiming the Christians were merely stealing from the Pagans, or reactionary Christians saying the Mainstream Church has been corrupted by these Pagan holidays.  But I have come to be with those who see these Cosmetic similarities as not inherently a bad thing.  These kinds of Pagan holidays are about observing what happens in nature, and we Christians believe everything in nature is God's design.  There is a reason this time of year was Chosen for Passover and for the Death and Resurrection of The Messiah.  So the Hebrew Roots types need to get over themselves and realize The Torah's own description of it's High Holy Days are just as superficially similar to what the Pagan Canaanites were doing, like for example Emar 373 and Emar 446.  Which God we Worship is the point.

And that is part of how I would argue that the Themes and Messages of Easter can still be found quite unintentionally in plenty of Anime, just like the Unknown God of Athens in Acts 17.

The Hanami is not quite a formal Shinto Festival, it doesn't seem like it's organized by the Shrines or anything.  But it is a part of Japanese culture during Late-March through May, the same basic time of year as Palm Sunday through Pentecost, but usually the big ones are in April.

The first example of Hanami observance in Anime that western fans were likely to have been exposed to is the 5th Episode of the Makai Tree (Doom Tree) Saga of Sailor Moon R (episode 51 of the series as a whole and 45 of the DiC order), the only episode of that arc directed by Kunihiko Ikuhara, but has the same writer who both began and ended it.  The Doom Tree saga shall continue to be a recurring subject on this blog, and indeed the entire Arc might well be good for viewing during the Easter season given the relevance it will have to the Eucatastrophe project I'm working on.

A website called Honeysanime.com made a Top 10 list of Hanami Anime.  Their number 1 was Clannad, Clannad and Clannad After Story does inevitably become a show about Death and Resurrection, and Clannad is considered the Spring of Key's Seasons Trilogy.  They also have a list of Cherry Blossom Scenes.  Here is a blogpost Itadakimasu did on the subject called This Day in Anime Hanami.

Not actually Anime but I've already said on this blog how the original Mothra and Mothra vs Godzilla movies from the 60s can work as Easter Movies.  I was gonna now recommend watching on YouTube the Devotional Criticism video on Mothra, but it seems those videos are now unavailable.

This is just the tip of the Iceburg, basically everything in Anime I've ever referred to as intentionally or not reflecting my view of The Gospel, since Easter is The Day of The Gospel.  But in order to feel like it's also amendable to Secular Easter it helps if it's set at or is about Spring Time, like parts of Majora's Mask.

And anything Jewish Anime fans find they like to watch during Passover is probably also good for Easter.

Update: A Year later and I find myself thinking of Pretear as an interesting Anime to add to this list, it's got Spring Imagery going on and definitely has some Gospel allegory potential.  I controversially consider it a much better show then Junichi Sato's other early 00s Magical Girl Anime.

Updating again in April 2022:  Going back to the Sailor Moon reference above, anytime Sailor Moon seems to be in Spring really works surprisingly well.  Usagi's name means Bunny that's why her Hair is like that, to look like Bunny ears.  

Also I've been looking into the Hebrew scholars who argue "Passover" isn't actually an accurate translation of Peshach and that the word really means Protection or Protector.  I looked into how you'd say either of those in Japanese simply because I've been constructing a sort of "Weeb Bible Translation" in my head and found something I should have remembered I already knew, that's what the name Mamoru means.  Mamoru is the name of Tuxedo Mask but Takeuchi had one point planned for it to be Sailor Jupiter's name.

There is arguably Spring imagery in the first Sailor Moon movie, Sailor Moon R:The Promise of The Rose, but it's also common in the first Cour of each year of the 90s Anime which tended to air in March-May, that includes the Doom Tree Saga (there are only two episodes I consider not good, episodes 3 and 7 of R, 49 and 53 total but 43 and 47 of the DiC order), and the first 6 episodes of Sailor Stars which you should watch instead of SuperS.

Pretear is arguably those themes of Sailor Moon brought to maturity for a somewhat older audience by a more experienced Junichi Sato, and it's fantastic.